Thea Djordjadze:

What art is about is the construction of the materials, so the materials then become aestheticised or pleasurable. The pleasure of those materials has to do with the intensification of the body. So this impulse to art is to not make oneself seductive but to made oneself intense, and in the process to circulate some of that eros that would otherwise go into sexuality.

[Elizabeth Grosz interview with Julie Copeland on Radio National 2005]

Artwork by Thea Djordjadze:

Simulating death when dead:

The fact is that there are hardly any reactions that it is not also able to perform when decapitated...in this condition, it can walk, regain its balance, move one of its threatened limbs autonomously, assume the spectral position, mate, lay eggs, build an ootheca, and, quite astonishingly, fall down in a false corpse-like immobility when confronted by danger or following a peripheral stimulation. I am deliberately using this indirect means of expressing myself because our language, it seems to me, has so much difficulty expressing, and our reason understanding, the fact that when dead, the mantis can simulate death.

[Roger Caillois on the Praying Mantis, from Space, Time and Perversion by Elizabeth Grosz 1995]

Artwork is by Hany Armanious:

Sexualisation of Survival.

Art is, for Deleuze, the extension of the architectural imperative to organise the space of the earth…This roots art not in the creativity of mankind but rather in a superfluousness of nature…It roots art in the natural and in the animal, in the most primitive and sexualised of evolutionary residues in man’s animal heritage. Art is evolutionary, in the sense that it coincides with and harnesses evolutionary accomplishments into avenues of expression that no longer have anything to do with survival. Art hijacks survival impulses and transforms them through the vagaries and intensifications posed by sexuality, deranging them into a new order, a new practice. Art is the sexualisation of survival or, equally, sexuality is the rendering artistic, the exploration of the excessiveness, of nature.

[Excerpt from "Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth" by Elizabeth Grosz, 2008]

Images: by Karl Blossfeldt, courtesy of www.butdoesitfloat.com